The soul of die Prussian army is in its officers,’ wrote the Prussian general, military theorist, and writer Baron Colmar von der Goltz in his widely read book The Nation in Arms. These officers, he continued, must be recruited from the privileged social classes “who exercise even in ordinary life a natural superiority over the masses.’ Goltz went on to underline the army's concern over restricting its leadership to the better elements of society when he cautioned that the nation's merchants, manufacturers, and private gentlemen were unlikely to provide good long-term officers.

How anyone today first comes to hear the name Max Nordau says much about his interests. He might, if his literary tastes so dictate, chance across him in Bram Stoker's Dracula, where Mina Harker cites Nordau as evidence that the count is a criminal and therefore of imperfectly formed mind. For Dracula's and Nordau's contemporaries, however, no such fortuitous encounters were necessary. Nordau was a household name whose most popular books appeared in scores of editions in a dozen languages. As a personality he was as colossal as his reputation. As critic, philosopher, novelist, playwright, sociologist, versifier, orator, journalist, polyglot, Zionist, psychologist, and physician, his versatility is impressive even when measured against an age when many tried their hand at more than one thing.

Germany in the fifteenth century was the scene of an extended struggle over the nature and scale of imperial institutions, and much of this conflict boiled down to the question of who was to pay taxes and how much. In the first half of the century, two alternative methods of financing the Reich emerged, and in the years around 1500 only one of these two methods proved to be politically practical. The style of imperial taxation which won out, the Matrikel, has long been studied in detail, and its workings are well known to any student of imperial institutions.1 From the first Matrikel in 1422 until the end of the Old Reich in 1806, negotiated quotas were the basis for payments to the Reich made by each of the three-hundred-odd estates. Paying the listed quota in men or money fell in principle on the government of the individual estate, which had to find its own way of raising the money or of passing the costs on to subjects. This method of raising public revenues was not, however, the only system of taxation which contemporaries thought to be possible or desirable. The Matrikel won out only after princely estates tried and failed to gain the adoption of a monetary tax paid directly by the population in proportion to individual wealth or income. I will first consider the development of imperial direct taxes in the fifteenth century, and then I will show that the defeat of that tax helped to determine the structure and scale of Reich institutions throughout the early modern period.

Because German historiography long derided 1848 as “das tolle Jahr,” studies of the impact of this crucial period on Prussia's eastern provinces have been relatively scanty. Professional historians, as well as the amateurs and antiquarians who wrote local history, preferred to treat revered and glamorous epochs like the Reformation, the deeds of the most famous Hohenzollern kings, the Wars of Liberation, or the like rather than events which in retrospect were deplored as one of the more shameful episodes of national history. This neglect, to be sure, has been rectified somewhat since the Second World War after the democratization of West Germany and the socialization of the East lent new interest and respectability to the Revolution of 1848. Then too, the loss of much of the old Prussian heartland to Poland has resulted in a number of often valuable studies of this region by Polish scholars who, however, have for understandable reasons tended to focus rather heavily on nationality problems.

The process of urbanization is treated by most historians as intimately related to other changes in the economic, cultural, and social life of societies and individuals. In some societies the growth of cities is one of the first steps in the processes of industrialization, secularization, cultural change, economic growth, and other changes often labelled “modernization.” A study of urbanization and other societal changes in German Jewry, however, suggests a different sequence.

In the eighteenth century Germany as a unified, sovereign state was only a vague idea. The Holy Roman Empire provided only a loose framework for more or less independent small states. In an area of 660,000 square kilometers there lived twenty-seven million inhabitants, divided among 310 territories, 50 imperial free cities, and 1,500 imperial knighthoods. Large German provinces such as East Prussia, West Prussia, and Schleswig were situated outside the imperial boundaries. The emperor had no real power. Since 1648 the territories had possessed sovereignty, and looked upon each other as foreign countries. Even a move to a neighboring village lying on the other side of the frontier was considered as emigration.

If in the 1890s any one aspect of economic development under capitalism confounded the prognostications of German Marxists it was the agricultural. The peasants had not obliged the pundits of German Social Democracy by permitting themselves to be ruined and liquidated as a class. The realization, based on a plethora of statistical evidence, that the peasant would be for years to come a hardy perennial disposed many leaders of the German Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD) to coquette with reformist approaches to the agrarian problem. This provoked the great debate of 1893–95 in the course of which traditional lines between orthodoxy and reformism became blurred. Some of the party's best men were compromised, and the “whole conception of the movement as that of a class which harbors goals of the broadest revolutionary compass” was put into question. The erosion of principle was such that not only men of the standing of Georg von Vollmar and Bruno Schoenlank in South Germany but also August Bebel, who was the generalissimo of the SPD, Ignaz Auer, and Wolfgang Heine in North Germany were to be labelled by Otto Wels, the later Social Democratic Reichstag leader, shining examples of opportunism. The problem of the small farmer was to be a major factor in the subsequent rise of revisionism, for Eduard Bernstein, that brilliant wandering star in many constellations, was to stress the indispensable auxiliary role of the peasantry in engineering the gradualist transformation of society along Social Democratic lines.

On March 21, 1931, the German and Austrian governments informed interested foreign governments that they had agreed on a plan to form a customs union. They presented the scheme, not as a step towards the fulfillment of a revisionist aim long held in the two countries, but as a purely economic contribution to European recovery from the depression. However, opinion at home and abroad greeted the project as the prelude to a political union; and the alarm was raised in those countries, notably France and Czechoslovakia, to whom the idea of such a union was inadmissible. Financial and political pressures were brought to bear, the more easily because, as a result of the collapse in May of the great Credit–Anstalt Bank, Austria desperately needed new international support; and the scheme was effectively quashed even before the Permanent Court of International Justice, in September, by a narrow majority pronounced it incompatible with Austria's international obligations.

The Revolution of 1848 has proven to be a continuously interesting field for historical research. Whether one sees it as a turning point where German history failed to turn, as an uprising bungled by a bunch of impractical professors, as a revolution undermined by ethnic hostility, or as a revolution which failed because it ignored the problems of the lower classes, the question of its failure has been almost as fruitful a focus of research as other countries' successful revolutions. Historians have also been attracted to it because it seems to provide outlines and previews of future events in German history. It marks, we are told, the growing politicization of the masses, the birth of social conflict, the inception of national struggles, or the first sign of the liberals' political cowardice.

Most historians of modern Germany, in describing the final year of World War I, generally note that a massive strike broke out in Berlin at the end of January 1918, spread to virtually every other major city of the empire, and then quickly collapsed. This said, they then usually move on to consider the events of great portent that followed: the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Russia, the spring offensive in the west, the military defeat of Germany, and the abortive revolution of 1918–19. The weakness of this approach is clear: it pays too little attention to the importance of the January strike.

Within months of its publication in January 1929 Erich Maria Remarque's novel All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues) was the world's best-selling book. It provoked a feverish controversy between those who claimed that it was an accurate representation of the war experience of 1914–18, portraying the utter futility of war, and those who denounced it as propaganda and an irreverent commercial exploitation of the Great War. Ironically, despite the intended focus of this heated debate, both the novel and the response which it elicited were more an emotional expression of postwar disillusionment and distress than a contribution to the understanding of the actual war experience.

Up to the end of the nineteenth century Germany was a country of emigrants. Until recently the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century transatlantic migration of more than five million Germans, mostly to North America, has been largely forgotten in contemporary Germany, except by a few historians. That is all the more true for the mass movement of foreign migrant workers into the German labor market in the decades preceding World War I. Of immediate interest in West Germany today is the so-called “guest-worker question” (Gastarbeiterfrage) which is now becoming an immigration issue in contrast to the earlier “foreign-worker question” in pre-World War I Germany. In recent years West Germany witnessed the transition from a country hiring “guest workers” to one possessing a genuine immigrant minority. This ongoing experience has contributed to a new interest in the historical development of transnational migration in both of its manifestations, as emigration and as immigration. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Germany experienced alternating waves of the two forms of transnational mass migration, both of which were dwarfed by the internal migration streams.

Every historian studying the emigration of Europeans to the United States discovers during such research that there was not only a crossing of the Atlantic westward, but a return movement from the United States to Europe as well. In 1842 Charles Dickens in his American Notes wrote about his experiences on a ship traveling from America to England: “We carried in the steerage nearly a hundred passengers: a little world of poverty. … Some of them had been in America but three days, some but three months, and some had gone out in the last voyage of that very ship in which they were now returning home. Others had sold their clothes to raise the passage-money, and had hardly rags to cover them; others had no food, and lived upon the charity of the rest. … They were coming back, even poorer than they went.”

The rise of large-scale laboratory research in nineteenth-century Germany has often been portrayed as a continuous success story. Taken as indicative are the two sciences on the leading edge of the trend, chemistry and physiology; developments in biology, physics, and the technical fields are then depicted either as imitations of or as the results of knowledge or personnel transfer from the leading disciplines. At first glance, the founding in 1879 of the world's first continuously operating psychological laboratory in Leipzig by Wilhelm Wundt, a physiologist turned philosopher, seems to fit this model very well. In one study, Joseph Ben-David and Randall Collins assert that this instance of “role hybridization,” as they call it, marked experimental psychology's “take-off into sustained growth” as a scientific discipline.